Sales Engineers Add Tech Expertise and More Product Value

Do you remember that kid at the school lunch table—kind of quiet and unassuming, but every so often he would let fly with the most hilarious comment from out of nowhere that broke everyone up? Meet Brec Carson, our Pendo version of that lunch table comedian—a witty, aerodynamic and super-smart sales engineer.

Brec Carson, Sales Engineer

Brec’s our resident engineer go-to for all things technical in sales and sits with our sales team to assist with seriously in-depth technical discussions and custom installations of our product. Brec ventured into the sales engineer position because he wanted to learn more about the real-world applications of our product and the customers we serve. You can overhear him on calls pleasantly explaining aspects of our product with amazing detail and good humor. He’s always asking customers loads of questions about how they use our product and then he shares those answers with the team so we all really get to know our customers better. And because Brec loves a good sandwich, every other Tuesday he hosts a technical “lunch and learn” to give non-techies some practical software knowledge and answer questions. Best of all when he’s not on the phone, Brec is quietly doing his own version of Seinfeld-like commentary about the Pendo office or making terrible puns. He keeps us laughing and our customers happy. Someone should name a sandwich after him. Maybe the Croque-Monsieur Brec, the Brec BLT or the Nerdwich? Either way, he can sit at our lunch table anytime.

What brought you to Pendo? Why here? Why this group of people rather than working elsewhere?

A couple things brought me to Pendo. Mostly it was Todd. Having worked with him in the past for years, including at another startup, meant I knew more or less what I was getting into. The other thing was the chance to work again on a product that I was genuinely interested in building/using. Previously, I’d built backend event processing for an AdTech company, and while those problems are interesting and challenging, I gravitate more towards user experience related problem-solving.

What aspect(s) of your job do you like?

In my new role as Sales Engineer (SE) I’m really enjoying seeing more of how the “rubber meets the road.” Seeing more of how our product is actually being used has helped me gain even more empathy and understanding of what matters most for our customer’s experience using our product.

What would you like to see happen more often with clients?

I like seeing (or often it’s hearing, as we’re on a call) when our clients realize the power of combining analytics with guidance—especially when we start talking about building usage based Segments to profile “Power Users” or “New Users” and the heuristics that can be employed to determine those memberships. Those are really fun moments.

An “aha” moment or story where you learned something from a client.

Framesets come to mind… in a bad way. I had never heard of them in my entire web app building career and then we saw them in a customer’s site. I started researching them to learn how to handle them and basically learned that no one should use them, ever.

How do you approach a call or problem-solving?

Prepare ahead if I can. Try to listen for the real problem not just the symptoms.